AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data — Further Update: Sometime after 7 pm the download link went down as well, but there is at least one mirror site. AOL is in damage control mode - the fact that they took the data down shows that someone there had the sense to realize …

AOL Releases Search Logs from 500,000 Users — AOL just released the logs of all searches done by 500,000 of their users over the course of three months earlier this year. That means that if you happened to be randomly chosen as one of these users, everything you searched for from March to May …

AOL Just Did the Unthinkable - Boycott AOL? — Thank you, Google for resisting the DOJ's effort to obtain user search data. You put up a good fight to protect our privacy, and you won. Too bad it was all in vain. — AOL, in blatant violation of its users privacy just released the log …

Investors, Including Bono, Buy a Piece of Forbes — SINCE the death in 1990 of the legendary publisher Malcolm S. Forbes, his four sons and a daughter have sold his cherished assets here and there — his private jet, the collection of Fabergé eggs, a handwritten copy of Lincoln's last address.

Forbes Sells "Significant Minority Stake" To Elevation Partners; Could Be Up To 40% For $250M-300M So the rumors about Forbes trying to sell a stake in the company were true: The Forbes family has formed a new company, Forbes Media, which includes the 89-year-old Forbes magazine …

Video clips by Viacom on Google — NEW YORK Google has struck a deal to allow Web site owners to put video clips from Viacom, including "SpongeBob SquarePants" and MTV's "Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County," on their pages. The clips will be accompanied by advertising, with Viacom …

Ex-Microsoft blogger starts on a new media adventure — If the public perception of Microsoft has softened recently, Robert Scoble may be partially responsible. — Over the past three years, Scoble has gained fame as the ``Microsoft blogger,'' a Microsoft employee writing online about Microsoft and its products.

Green tech's growth — Marauding venture capitalists in Silicon Valley regularly anoint a new hot technology, and this year the winner is without a doubt clean, or ``green,'' technology. — As oil prices skyrocketed over the past year, early-stage investors nearly quadrupled their bets …

MyWSJ Launches; Personalized News For Subs Only — It's the latest online news accessory — the personalized pages of yesteryear reimagined with the tools of today. The NYT's MyTimes.com beta has been rolling out slowly over the past few weeks, My USA Today News beta is up and this past week beta invites started to arrive for MyWSJ.

Nokia Nseries Blogger Relations program is a success — Last fall I was contacted by Andy Abramson to see if I was interested in checking out a new Nokia Nseries Symbian Series 60 smartphone. Andy is the founder of [the] Comunicano [PR agency][ ](they do much more than PR …

Flycast 2.0 aka Adify Launches — Larry Braitman and Richard Thompson, who had started Flycast Communications, an early ad-network in 1996, are back for an encore: this time with San Bruno-based Adify. Right in time to cash in on the ongoing eyeball boom and a sharp upswing in online advertising …

MAINSTREAM MEDIA MELTDOWN III — Might the Long Tail actually reduce choice? — Nick Carr notes a NYT column that suggests that if all content is "unbundled" and forced to fend for itself, the cultural products subsidized by commercial junk may go away.

Rolling snowballs — When Doc was speaking at Reboot earlier this year he spoke of rolling snowballs. Chucking ideas out and seeing which ones gain traction. If you throw enough of them out in the first place there is more chance of one of them gathering size and then who knows where you end up.

For Big Media Players, Bold Moves Are Back — IT'S late in the day and it's 100 degrees outside — our normal patience quotient is at the fraying end," Richard D. Parsons, the chairman of Time Warner was saying into the phone the other day during an interview.

Even dead people can't escape AOL — Maxine Gauthier doesn't own a computer. She doesn't know the first thing about Web browsing or sending e-mail. She's not even sure where to find a computer's "on" button, as she describes it. — Yet for the past nine months, she has been fighting …